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Todd
January 15, 2008
Nope. Didn�t like it.
That is not to say that I found all of it dreadful, or found it to be an abject failure. But on adding up, I find that overall, I didn�t like it. I feel much the same way as I did when I finally broke down and saw Madonna�s Evita. Some pleasant surprises, some delightful moments, but when held up against the many theatre versions I�ve seen, both recorded and live, it failed to measure up.
I loved Johnny Depp; as actors go, he was a great Sweeney. His singing voice was, though pleasant, not quite strong enough, and the arrangements of some of the music seemed to serve neither the lyrics nor his limited abilities, making me wonder why, exactly, they�d gone that route. The problem with a masterpiece like Sweeney is that every note, every inflection, every beat serves the story. These songs are dialogue, and need to be treated as such. Pauses, emphasis, tempo, are all more in keeping with speech than straight songs. And the way songs are done PLUS where they appear in the show counts for so much! If songs that should be staccato are done lyrically, and vice-versa, than the show doesn�t flow right. That�s what I kept seeing and hearing all the way through. And if you start cutting out entire songs, you are cutting out vital exposition and plot advancement. I, who can recite/sing the entire show, felt lost in a couple of places�I don�t know how a novice would get it.
- Mrs. Lovett was all wrong. The thing about Mrs. Lovett is that she is every bit the amoral, sociopathic, single-mindedly obsessed criminal that Sweeney is. She fancies herself a sweet and sentimental little thing, but she fools only herself and the boy Toby with that routine. It�s her idea to make the victims into pies, for godsake! Don�t turn around and make her look genuinely remorseful at resigning Toby to a horrible fate! Mrs. L shouldn�t pause for more than a second at dealing with a situation she sees as coming between her and her object of obsession.
- Rickman, god love �im, did his truly brilliant best at being menacing. But his Turpin just didn�t have the pedophilia vibe that makes the judge truly creepy and evil. I don�t know whether that was a decision of the actor, the writer, or the director, but I missed it. (He did great on �Pretty Women�, though!)
- The choices for Johanna and Anthony sucked. Why couldn�t we have singers in those roles, for the love of Sondheim? Or failing that�actors who could act and sing at the same time?
- Additionally, I barely recognized the character of Johanna at all. She never got much chance to show her character (�Kiss Me� was cut, and the Asylum Scene ending was changed so she didn�t shoot Fogg), and when she did, she was just sort of mopey and�hopeless. Maybe she realized that she didn�t have much of a (Anthony) Hope to work with.
- Speaking of characters who got the slighted�most of Lucy�s incidental chatter and ALL of her rude expressions were cut. Which to me wasn�t playing fair with the audience, as those are a valuable clue to who she is, and even if you don�t figure it out, it heightens the shock once her identity is revealed. And in this day and age, in this bloody, bloody production, surely a little �Hey-hoy, sailor-boy� could have gotten through.
- Characters who got slighted, part 3�Beadle Bamford. From the altered lyric that cut the reference to his OWN lust for Lucy, to the omission of the harmonium scene, he got screwed. Timothy Spall did the best he could with what he had, though.
- NO CHORUS. Even over the closing credits�NO CHORUS.
- And lastly, I truly didn�t have a problem with the blood. The vivid, glorious, copious blood. But did Burton have to show each and every victim crashing and crunching to the cellar floor in such loving, lingering detail? Ugh.
Reading: "Life�s Little Ironies", by Thomas Hardy.
Listening: The OCR of Sweeney Todd, in order to wash those wispy, insipid movie-star voices out of my brain with the belting of good, honest theatre folk .
At Random: clickhere
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